Simon Linke UK, b. 1957

Simon Linke (b. 1958, Benalla, Australia) is a British artist, best known for making paintings based on Artforum advertisements since 1985.

Slightly smaller than one of Artforum's full-page ads, Simon Linke's paintings corrupt the clean graphic layout of their source through a full-on indulgence in an excess of oil paint. Replicating the ads as faithfully as possible while wrangling a robust, fluid material within an almost comically limiting surface area, Linke's paintings exist as a near-perfect contradiction between boldly expressed market confidence and an artist's potential alienation from the pressures to produce a consistent product.

Arresting Artforum's iconic monthly bulletins announcing the "new" in a relief of thickly applied paint, Linke's paintings express the ideal of stability where there is none, flipping the temporal nature of an exhibition notice on its head. Focusing largely on recognizable blue chip artists and galleries, the paintings' compact size and precise articulation offer an ironic contrast to the overwhelming scale and volume of the contemporary art market from which their subjects are derived.

The work explores themes around contemporary art and permanence, history, subjectivity and the market while referring to On Kawara and Hanne Darboven in terms of seriality and repetition, and Andy Warhol and Sherrie Levine in relation to questions of authenticity and authorship.

 

Linke’s works have been exhibited in several museums and institutions, among all: Le Consortium in Dijon, FRAC Limousin, Deste Foundation in Athens, Galleria Civica in Modena, Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Fondazione Re Rebaudengo Sandretto in Turin, The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, The National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto and at the Biennale of Venice in 1988. He has works in a number of public collections including Tate, London, Fondazione Re Rebaudengo Sandretto in Turin, Italy and FRAC Limousin, France.